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Diner
Volume 7
The Imaginary Poets, Alan Michael Parker, ed.,
reviewed by Tom March
The poets contributing to Alan Michael Parker's The lmaginary Poets have submitted imaginary translations of imaginary poems by imaginary poets. The "real" poets also provide biographical overviews and brief critical essays that cover topics including the imaginary poets' evolution as writers, the reception history of their work, and the challenges of translation. Over twenty distinguished poets — including Jennifer Michael Hecht, Garrett Hongo, Maxine Kumin, and Mark Strand — have contributed to this volume, each demonstrating serious commitment to exploring the liberations and provocations of Parker's compelling assignment. The result is a series of unique embodiments of the value of truth in art, and art as truth, at a time when many are less interested in what a text does than in who did it.
Many of the contributions illuminate the struggles that translators always face, between correspondence of diction, verbal nuance, and poetic form — each with demands that are nearly impossible to satisfy simultaneously. Laure-Anne Bosselaar, for example, includes two possible translations of a poem by "Anne-Maëlle Mathieu,&uot; displaying the distance that choices in translation can create. By providing a poetic translation as well as a transliteration of the work of "J II," imaginary author of an apocryphal Book of Judith, Judith Hall illustrates both the limitations and desirable freedom translation allows. Eschewing the typical pose of the translator to "begin with an apology and end with a hope," Hall embraces the possibilities of change that the role allows. "[m]y goal as a translator is not so much 'perfection'. . . as metamorphosis. Has the poem been transformed and transformed according to the spirit of the original?" Kevin Prufer's poem by "Wen Bo," suggests that such change can reasonably extend even to a complete rearrangement of the poem's structure. Deciding that English is not capable of rendering the effects of the original poem's Chinese tz'u form, Prufer approximates the significance of the poem's fixed form by transforming it into a villanelle.
The pervasive anxiety that the "translators" express about the inevitable metamorphoses that translation imposes mirrors a more pervasive concern about originality and authenticity — one that The Imaginary Poets seems designed to confront. The newly-fashioned poets often have such plausible histories and such coherent voices that it doesn't take much effort to suspend disbelief and suspect, however briefly, that these are names we've seen before, on college syllabi or in book reviews, somewhere. The voice that emanates from the brief autobiographical pieces of Mark Strand's "Marin K," for instance, is believable even as it is inconsistent with the biography Scrand provides. The most significant correlation Strand finds is in the hole left in "Marin K"'s only remaining poems by the bullet that killed him — somehow fitting, Strand observes, for a man who as a boy wished for his own annihilation.
But we should pay careful attention to how easily our attachment to a poem or persona can allow our credulity to overcome, even if only momentarily, our knowledge that this person never existed — at least, not in the flesh. Just as we demand a translator's faithfulness to what we have decided is the essence of the original, we tend to require, of all creative endeavors, that what we read or see or hear have some correspondence to a truth that we already know, that has already happened. Parker's cohort collectively challenges its readers to recognize both the legitimacy of the fictional mask and the reason for its appeal — what makes us willing to believe, especially when we believe most strongly, in what we already know to be false? In answering that question, we come closer to understanding the edifying (and also manipulative) power of convincing possibility, a power that loses very little in the face of mere facts. |
